Where Monsters Hide

by M. William Phelps

  The chief also brought up the “voices” Jason heard inside his head. She mentioned a text proving Kelly never had keys to Chris’s apartment—she likely took them from Chris. Plus, Chris’s keys were still missing, and several neighbors reported that Kelly would have to bang on Chris’s door to get in. Chris would sometimes leave a rug in between the door so Kelly could get into the building.

  “I think they might be looking to take off,” Frizzo told the prosecutor.

  “Why would you say that?”

  “Kelly has been listing furniture for sale online.”

  The prosecutor nodded affirmatively. She understood the urgency of Frizzo’s plea.

  “I’ve also been contacted by a private investigator who is looking into Chris Regan’s disappearance. He came into the station and told me—very respectfully—that he did not want to interfere with anything we had going on and said he would keep me in the loop as to what he was working on.”

  “That should not affect your case . . . and any information he receives should be turned over to you.”

  “Okay. I’ll work on this warrant and e-mail it when I’m done,” Frizzo said.

  The final note Frizzo made on a list of forty-eight summarized facts, included in her warrant, summed up the chief’s case: “I believe that these listed investigative discoveries show that Christopher Regan’s last destination was to 66 Lawrence Street, Caspian.”

  The paper and electronic trail of Chris’s life ended there.

  33

  EXECUTION

  AT EIGHT-THIRTY A.M. ON MARCH 5, 2015, CHIEF FRIZZO TOOK A RIDE over to Kelly and Jason Cochran’s Caspian home. Frizzo was looking to stir up the waters a bit. Her search warrant was done. She’d expected it to come through soon. Fearing they were preparing to run, Frizzo wanted to keep tabs on Kelly and Jason.

  “Kelly, hey, I have some things I’d like you to have a look at—I think they’re Chris’s. Can you come down to the station for me?”

  Kelly seemed taken aback, but agreed.

  They drove separate vehicles.

  Frizzo wanted to monitor Kelly’s reaction to seeing something they had in evidence. She also wanted to rattle Kelly a bit, let Kelly and her husband know she wasn’t going away.

  Frizzo displayed the yellow Post-it with directions to the Cochran house, which had been found inside Chris’s vehicle.

  “Have a look at this,” Frizzo said, placing the plastic bag that held the Post-it onto a table in front of Kelly.

  Kelly stared. Went quiet.

  “You recognize that handwriting—do you think it’s Chris’s?” Frizzo asked, staring at Kelly, gauging her body language.

  Kelly shook her head. “I am unable to say for sure.”

  Frizzo pulled out a pair of biking gloves the IRPD found outside Chris’s apartment in January.

  “Those his?”

  “Cannot say for sure, but they do look like something he would wear.”

  As they talked, a ding sounded. Kelly took out a TracFone from her purse and stared at the screen.

  After reading the text, she said, “Why didn’t you tell me two detectives were going to talk to Jason while I was here?” It felt to Kelly as if Frizzo had pulled a sleight-of-hand trick.

  “I didn’t know anything about two detectives going over there to speak with Jason, Kelly. Detectives working this case are not even in town at this time.”

  Not long after, two people walked into the IRPD; a man named Jackson Roper (pseudonym) and a woman. They were private investigators, Roper explained, working on the case. They had just come from talking to Jason at the Cochran house.

  “He wouldn’t allow us in or talk to us,” Roper told Frizzo. “Can we talk to Kelly—she’s here, right?”

  “I’ll check with her.”

  Kelly agreed, so Frizzo gave them an interview suite.

  After the discussion between Kelly and the two PIs, Frizzo approached Kelly.

  “Can I come over to your house and talk to you about a few things, Kelly?”

  “That’s fine.” Kelly just wanted to go home.

  “I’ll be right over.”

  Kelly left. Frizzo sat down with the PIs.

  By that time, around ten-thirty in the morning, Stephanie Brule, a prosecuting attorney standing in for Melissa Powell, who was out of town on business, called to say the warrant was well done. She encouraged Frizzo to get it “sworn” in front of the magistrate.

  The PIs would not relate exactly what they had spoken to Kelly about. Still, “Jason was angry with us for being there at the house.”

  “I have a search warrant prepared and I’m thinking of executing it today,” Frizzo told them.

  “You think I could assist in that?” Roper asked.

  “I’ll check with the prosecutor, but maybe you can be part of it—as long as you don’t touch anything, you know.”

  “I think they might be a flight risk,” Roper said. He did not complete his thought with a specific reason, but warned Frizzo there was the chance the Cochrans were going to run.

  Frizzo thought about something her administrative assistant, Wendy Otto-Shimun, had recently uncovered: Kelly had added herself as a member of an online group searching for “Homes to Rent in Middle Tennessee.”

  “Well, thanks for the info,” Frizzo said. “I’ll let you know about the search. I don’t see a problem.”

  “You betcha.”

  Roper and his partner left.

  Chief Frizzo spent a lot of time talking on the phone and exchanging e-mails about the case with Jackson Roper. So she felt completely confident in his ability and did not see him as some sort of bogus Hollywood-type sleuth. Jackson Roper was actually a retired law enforcement officer with nearly thirty years on the job.

  She called the prosecutor and filled her in on what was a parallel investigation, essentially, telling her Roper could help and she could use all the eyes and ears she could get at this stage.

  “Extra eyes and theories are never a bad thing,” Frizzo commented later. “I don’t need to claim all the glory to anything. The best investigator is a team player and realizes every player helps bring forth a victory. The prosecutor’s office allowed [Roper] to be present, with the understanding that he touches nothing and is there only to observe and assist.”

  “You’re cleared to come,” Frizzo explained to Roper.

  The chief gathered her troops. It was time to head over to the Cochran house and take that place apart.

  34

  BARE NAKED LADIES

  SHE WAS WITH SEVERAL FRIENDS. THEY’D DECIDED A ROAD TRIP WAS in order. Kelly and her girlfriends piled into “this huge Ford Econoline” van and headed out to a local lake.

  As they trekked down the road, singing to the radio, laughing at each other’s jokes, the weed burned hot and the drinks flowed cold.

  When they arrived at the lake, one of them made a suggestion: “Let’s strip down naked.”

  “Hell, yeah” echoed throughout the van.

  Clothes flew in the air as they all ran toward the water. They frolicked and swam like adolescent schoolgirls on the first day of summer break. Laughing and splashing, yelling and screaming, Kelly looked up toward the parking lot.

  “Cops,” she said.

  With that, she realized she’d lost the keys to the van in the water.

  Panic.

  “Shit!”

  The cops took off from the parking lot and the girls went back to the van to try and figure out how they were going to get home.

  One of the girls called her father.

  And he taught us how to hot-wire the van over the phone, Kelly wrote.

  Years later, Kelly would tell this story to a pen pal. It arose during a discussion—via letters—over the idea of marriage. At this time, both were incarcerated. The man had written to Kelly after seeing an article about her in Rolling Stone magazine. After introducing himself, they exchanged several letters, which turned into a quasi-romantic relationship, subsequently becoming sexually e
xplicit and deeply personal. The man was much more of a writer than Kelly. He’d send twelve-, thirteen-, fourteen-, or even fifteen-page letters detailing his life and the life he wanted with Kelly.

  In her girls’-day-at-the-lake letter, Kelly talked about her life with Jason. She spoke of her marriage as if it had been a fairy tale gone bad. I married the boy next door, she wrote. She’d meant that literally, not as a description of Jason. I thought it would be perfect. But, of course, it wasn’t. From the earliest days of the marriage, she had tried, she wrote, [to] do everything to make him happy and to feel love. Fairly early into the union, she felt that Jason wasn’t “capable” of love. This was the hardest part of the relationship for her to “understand.” She couldn’t wrap her mind around the idea that some people were not able to love their fellow human beings.

  Kelly described how she should have run at the first sign of Jason’s unloving, violent tendencies, but she didn’t, obviously. By then, it was too late, she wrote. (Although Kelly failed to say when all of this actually occurred.) Something she never mentioned to the IRPD or MSP: she felt Jason “wasn’t going to let” her go.

  There were “many times” throughout the marriage when she “begged” Jason to let her go and grant her a divorce.

  Jason made his stance clear: “I will kill you if you try to get away.”

  Marriage, Kelly concluded, is horrifying to me.

  In letters to her parents, Kelly talked about the marriage as if she lived a daily existence under the fear and anxiety that Jason would kill her. She described him as a Svengali-like figure, thumping around the house, intimidating her with his stares, threatening her, letting her know she was forever trapped. There was no way out.

  Her parents wrote during this same period, asking Kelly why she never asked for help. How come she never pulled them aside and whispered that Jason was a raging, controlling maniac who was probably going to kill her someday?

  I thought I knew the answer to this . . . , Kelly wrote. Contradicting what she would say to her pen pal, Kelly said she had not become scared of Jason until October 2014: after seeing him do everything he did. [He] would have found a way to . . . kill me. She talked about how strong she used to be (emotionally), but now she saw herself as “weak.” She talked about how Jason had taken much from her: I blame myself for staying.

  At this point, they slept in separate rooms. She’d wake up and there he was: Standing over me, staring with this hollow look in his eyes . . . [Jason] had two sides to him, but maybe one with just good acting ability.

  Answering her parents’ question specifically, Kelly said she was scared of what Jason would do if she left.

  To her.

  To them.

  To anyone she knew.

  She was scared of “failing” at her marriage, before writing how she once believed: [I] could save him from himself.

  These were strange and inconsistent comments. Because if Kelly was so terrified of what Jason might do (to her or to anyone in her family, especially), why would she risk being caught cheating on him? It didn’t make sense. She portrayed herself as the terrified wife, a woman in constant fear, wondering if her husband would kill her at any moment.

  * * *

  CHIEF FRIZZO FOUND TWO VIDEOS on Kelly’s phone contradicting everything she had said in these series of letters. There they were hanging out at a waterfall. Jason smoking a joint, playfully standing on the rocks, smiling for Kelly. And Kelly, talking to him casually, lovingly. Jason reciprocating. The videos portray Jason as a calm, charming guy who is having a nice day in nature with his wife.

  “Jason Cochran is the victim here, too,” Laura Frizzo said later. “That much became clear to me as we began to unpack the horror that happened to Christopher Regan.”

  35

  PREMONITION

  IN LATE FEBRUARY, LAURA FRIZZO WAS TALKING TO ONE OF HER HIGH-SCHOOL girlfriends, who’d just happened to be in town for a few days. Of course, the subject taking up most of Frizzo’s mind was Chris Regan’s disappearance. On March 4, Frizzo’s girlfriend called her. She was taking off and wanted to say good-bye.

  “Listen, Laura, I have a good friend who’s a psychic.”

  “I . . .”

  “I know, I know. But I spoke with her. She’d like to talk to you about Chris to see if she gets anything from the conversation.”

  Frizzo’s friend gave her the psychic’s name and number.

  “We’ll see. Thanks,” Frizzo said.

  Could it hurt?

  Later that day, the chief found herself doing something she never thought she would do: sitting down with a psychic. There was no mistaking that Frizzo had experienced spiritual moments regarding Chris Regan’s presence in her life, as if he were guiding her in some way. She could not deny how deep the connection between her and this missing man, whom she had never met, had become.

  As she listened to the psychic talk about Chris Regan and the case, Frizzo felt a tickle of folly. What was she doing? Relying on a stranger to tell her what happened to her victim? Or simply passing time until that break came through?

  It was not a visit to lead the investigator in any particular direction. Frizzo knew the search warrant was going to be sworn any day now and she was anxious. She needed to keep her mind occupied, but also focused.

  Walking out of the psychic’s, Frizzo took a moment inside her car to reflect. She took a breath, lighting a cigarette.

  Exhaling, the chief was taken by one specific thing the psychic had said.

  “She told me that she felt Chris was hit with something on the back of his head—possibly a baseball bat.”

  Sure, anyone could have taken an educated guess at that, and, within reason, gotten close. But what Laura Frizzo was about to find would convince her that there was an ethereal force working alongside her, something she could not explain.

  36

  BLOOD AND AMMO

  CHIEF LAURA FRIZZO AND COLLEAGUES ROLLED UP ON THE COCHRAN house in Caspian in early March, 2015, at eleven fifty-one a.m. one morning. Jackson Roper, the PI Frizzo had been talking to, stood by, waiting for the opportunity to help where he could.

  Kelly answered the door after the chief rapped on it with force, making it clear this was not a social call.

  “This is a search warrant for the residence, property, outbuildings, and vehicles. The lab is on the way,” Frizzo explained. “Once they get here, you cannot stay inside the residence.”

  Frizzo found Kelly to be “emotionless”—that stoic, blank affect she had all but mastered by this point. Though Kelly seemed to understand the serious turn her life and Jason’s had taken, she did not seem rattled by the notion that the police were there to collect murder evidence.

  “Where is Jason?” Frizzo asked.

  “Upstairs. Sleeping.”

  “Go wake him up. You cannot be here while the warrant is processed and executed. Can you go to a neighbor’s or friend’s?”

  Kelly yelled, “Jason! Jason!”

  The big man came down the stairs and stood behind his wife. Disheveled, he said nothing.

  Frizzo mentioned the dogs. Get them secured somewhere so the troops could trickle in and dig. Then: “Maybe you and Jason want to sit in a patrol car to stay warm—’cause it’s pretty darn cold out there today.”

  They agreed.

  As she walked into the foyer of the Cochran house, just beyond that ramp leading up to the door, Frizzo noted the door into the kitchen and the hole in the center of it. Next to the door, on the inside of the house, a wooden baseball bat leaned against the wall. Frizzo felt the bat had been placed strategically there for some reason.

  Seeing the bat, Frizzo looked up. On the ceiling above the bat, she noticed a spatter pattern of some sort, which the PIs had told Frizzo to look for.

  Gotta be blood.

  “It had been cleaned, I could tell. But you could still see the staining where it started and widened as you went into the dining room.”

  Luminol, the chief thought. The entir
e area needs to be sprayed.

  Taking a moment, feeling as though she was standing on the spot where Chris Regan entered the house and someone smashed him over the head with that bat, Frizzo felt a tingle. That damn psychic and her baseball bat premonition.

  Before they stepped out of the house, Frizzo asked Kelly and Jason about weapons in the house.

  “There’s a gun under the entertainment center,” Kelly said. She pointed.

  “You and Jason, sit down on the couch.”

  Not a request.

  Frizzo walked over to the entertainment center. Looked, spotted, then picked up a Blue Steel .22-caliber revolver, fully loaded, tucked inside a canvas holster.

  A bat and gun? Kind of armed to the teeth here.

  One of the MSP troopers who had walked through the house “to make sure it was safe” came across a twelve-gauge shotgun upstairs. Unloaded. Inside a case.

  Beyond those weapons, no others.

  The Cochrans had stopped using their iPhones by this point, which the IRPD had forensically searched, downloaded, and given back to them. Frizzo and her team found two TracFones they were now using. Burners. An Alcatel and Huawei. Wired magazine had once rated these phones, based on the notion that the user was concerned with being “targeted for confiscation and search,” as the perfect choices if one wanted to avoid “leaving a trace of your phone activity.” In fact, one could “wipe clean and destroy” these burners “without much thought.”

  Before Kelly and Jason left the house to sit inside a cruiser, Frizzo looked around the living and dining rooms. She noticed a few household items that had an odd air about the way they were positioned.

  “That couch is pulled out at a strange angle,” Frizzo said to Kelly. Looking at her, Frizzo noticed Kelly had blue paint on the cuticles of her fingernails.

  “Um, well, I’ve been doing a lot of rearranging. We’ve been painting, too.”

  “Look, you cannot stay in here. You’re both free to leave and go anywhere you want. You just cannot stay inside the house.”